Planning a SharePoint Farm

SharePoint Server is deployed in a topology or layout called a farm. A farm is made up of one or more servers with specific roles or tasks assigned to them. Each of these roles performs different functions in the farm, and they work together to deliver a complete solution.

SharePoint Server deployments traditionally require architects and administrators to plan out the servers and services that are necessary. These architecture services typically include components for searching and indexing the database, the cache, and the application server roles.

While that fine-grained detail and control is still available, Microsoft has also developed a new deployment approach called MinRole. MinRole's design purpose is to optimize your system's resources and maximize performance while providing the best end user experience. To do this, administrators select from a set of roles to apply to a server when creating or joining a SharePoint Server farm.

As stated, the ability to manage SharePoint Server roles manually is still available. This book, however, will focus on deploying MinRole topologies. To learn more about custom roles, go to https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/install/planning-for-a-minrole-server-deployment-in-sharepoint-server.

In this chapter, we'll focus on the necessary tasks to plan aspects of a SharePoint Server farm:

• Selecting and configuring a farm topology
• Designing for high availability
• Planning for disaster recovery
• Planning and configuring backup and restore options
• Planning for information rights management
• Planning localization and language packs
• Planning and configuring content farms
• Planning integration with Office 365 workloads
• Planning and configuring the OneDrive sync client
• Planning and configuring a high-performance farm

Mastering these planning tasks will allow you to successfully plan a robust SharePoint topology.